Priya-
I haven't been following too closely and maybe I missed some of the considerations for your selection but how much data are you talking about?
Are there any other data sources to consider besides the AS400 data or is this the only data for consideration in your tool selection?
How many users will be using the BI tool?
What industry is your company in?
Does your industry have any specific/ unique requirements that a BI tool needs to perform? For example it's not a coincidence that Microstrategy is used by 80+% of all retail companies.
Does your company use a CRM product?
Will the BI tool need to report on both financial and operational data?

Is there a reason not to use DB2 which is integrated into the AS/400 operating system? It is a highly competitive RDBMS and you already own it. It would be the easiest database to use as you would just be moving your data from one set of files and libraries to another when updating your data mart or warehouse.

If you are an AS/400 shop, and if you have skilled AS/400 programmers and administrators, I'd highly recommend keeping your data on DB/2 on AS/400 - it's an excellent database, very capable and very robust.

I've done just that a few years ago, in my past as IT Executive - I implemented QlikView as a BI tool, and I built my Operational Data Storage on the AS/400, combining data from multiple systems prior to extracting it into QlikView.

On the other hand, if your AS/400 is overly loaded, or if you only use it as a "black box", without necessarily having AS/400 developers in house, I'd say that you are best off with MS SQL Server - probably the most affordable and straight-forward database to use as an intermediate storage between your source systems and your BI tools.

Keep in mind though that might not even need one at all - many tools (QlikView included) can read your data straight from your sources, combine data from multiple systems and store it in their own internal databases or other data structures. Not always you need any DBMS in the middle.

I see a lot of requests for price/cost for the major BI vendors (Business Objects, Cognos, Microstrategy, Oracle BI) so I included the vendors' list pricing in the last research paper I wrote. You can find the non-discount prices for these vendors in the appendix of the paper at this url: http://www.pentaho.com/lower_bi_costs/

The paper topic is a scenario-based comparison of software and support costs between open source and the big 4 BI vendors. The costs are at the end of the paper in the appendix.

I couldn't include discounting in the comparison because the vendor practices are so complicated. Some discount more than others. Some discount support as well as licenses. There are lots of special market discounts.

In general, you can expect to spend 30-40% of the stated prices for the configurations shown, and the per-user cost by vendor works ok as a proxy for configurations in between the scenario sizes. If you're in a small or medium sized business (definitions vary by vendor) then your pricing will usually start at 40% of the prices shown, and you can expect to negotiate another 20-25% discount. If you're in government or academia, discounting can go to extremes, up to 80-90%. Likewise, buying at the end of quarters/years in competitive deals where one vendor has software in-house (e.g. you have Oracle or DB2 and are looking at their BI tools) means the discounting can be much higher. In some cases the sales reps are allowed to discount 60-70% to get the deal.

Hope this answers some cost questions for the major BI vendors. Don't ask me about Microsoft or all the smaller or SaaS BI vendors. I haven't collected that information yet so I have no data.

I have this concern here, I don't knw if I got the concept right, sorry im newJ:
1. DB2 is integrated in AS400, and the source data would be stored in a proper way in a DBMS rite?so will using the DB2 take more space and resources?
2. we don't have a data mart or DW?It would definitely make our reporting data more structured if we have a data mart. Most vendors we deal with, are concerned abt this.
3. In the end, we want reporting to be faster, accurate and meaningful by taking this measures, or, I would think querying out data from the AS400 seems to be easier!...Reporting tools are quite sophisticated and many features, but im concerned on how our source data is managed too?

Hi Priya,
I tend to agree with bonddb2j and Oleg. Meaning DB2 is the DBMS for AS400 (Mind you I am SW / Business app person). Hums like there is NO issues at all. My experience over the last 20 years is that DB2 handles very efficiently on its own. IBM has put a lot of thought into it. Unless you have very little spare space in the hard drive, you don't need a DBA role. Rule of Thumb is to leave about 10-15% free. 85% utilisation or below. Now a days HD’s are cheap as chips.

Many BI vendors talk of data mart etc. This is all good if you use one of the leading business apps such and SAP etc. Usually they have a template for the data-mart. As far as I see, the data-mart is a place you collect logical data in a easily accessible table (DB2). In my case it is the details of each expense and revenue classified by all product classifications and all Customer classifications. We have collected this in a DB2 table (provided by my main ERP vendor). This DB2 table tells me when (by week number in a year), a product was sold to an individual customer. We use 17 levels of product classification and 5 levels of customer classification (23 classifications). If anyone needs transaction detail they go across to the transaction processing system to look at the details.

Given that you are allowing users to run adhoc queries with your BI tool. This would be the best approach. Just point them to the main tables. Lets say Customer Master, Item Master and Revenue / Expense Table. This method seems to work for my company.

Thanks a lot Mark for this comprehensive material. In our case we (business) are looking at getting out of the viscious circle of the megavendors - also in the BI domain. Problems is that the vendor/IT community are too tightly knit and lot of the outcomes made are not based on rational approach and business sense. We are currently locked with one of those also on the BI front and the main issue we have is a very rigid response times to business changes. Our main criteria is a flexible delivery model (easy to use, fast, single environment) where product portfolios are constantly on the move and business rules change rapidly. We need a tool that?s integral to our Decision Making platform - front office sales execution (that?s why the Real Time monitoring is needed also). Strategic as well operational decision spectrum needs to be part of the service. We need to be able to develop outputs in-house and maximum time-to-market period is 1 month (after that users go back to excel). Current solution just can?t match that. What does Pentaho claim in this respect? Mind you we are not pure development but mix of analysts getting the user requirements and delivering a dashboard based outputs. We have a Datawarehouse providing most of transactional data feeds off-line into a Data Mart where staging takes place as well as integrating other sources incl. excel and non-structured data (manual entries) that is in a process of being migrated to an ERP / BPMS applications. We cannot access the production db?s in .Is there a Master Data Management layer included? Is there a In-Memory architecture offered? Is there a event driven processing engine for a Real Time monitoring? How do we leverage existing RDBMS tools or data sources (data integrators, OLAP cubes)? What documentation need we look at to get a background on the offering? Thank you

The way you described your requirements - "easy to use", "fast", "single environment", "time-to-market period is 1 month", - all those requirements are very typical descriptions of what QlikView has to offer:

1. QlikView is extremely easy to use. QlikVIew's main mantra is "simplicity" . End users love using QlikView for the ease of use - they get what they need in just a few clicks. Developers love using QlikView for the ease of development. Since we are not building OLAP cubes and datamarts, our development process is much easier than the typical cycle that you are used to with most traditional tools...

2. QlikView is extremely fast-paced. In the run-time, all the calculations are happening in RAM, and that is lightning-fast. Development process is fast, too - because, once again, we don't have to build cubes. We simply load the data and link it together, leaving the "heavy lifting" for QlikView engine.

3. QlikView is a single tool. All the processes - extraction, transformation and loading the data, developing front-end objects and even end-user navigation - all of that is happening within a single tool. In the Corporate environments, QlikView Server is used for delivering QlikView applications to end users. That's it - no hodge-podge of modules that were slapped together (in contrast to Cognos or BO). No complex layers to get trained on. The basic training class for Developers is 5 days, Power Users (Designers) - 2 days. End Users' training is 1 hour.

4. In order to achieve Time to Market (we often call it "time to value") under 1 month, one needs to break out of the traditional OLAP technology.

- If you have to determine in advance what Dimensions you are ever going to need, and what calculations are you ever going to ask for, - you are out of the time window.
- If you are limited by the boundaries of the multi-dimensional cube, and adding a dimension means growing the whole cube at the multitude of the new Dimension's size - your job is way too tough to be done in a month.
- If you have several layers of technology (ETL, DW, Cubes, Data-Marts, UI), and each layer requires a separate skill-set and a separate team of developers, and the hand-shake between those separate teams requires tons of documentation - there is no way you can accomplish your job in a month.

For all those reasons, QlikView is very much different - no cubes, no pre-defined Dimensions and Measurements, no layers of technology. A single developer can deliver the whole solution from raw data to dazzling visualizations, with minimal development required, and minimum documentation needed. Except for the most complex analytic solutions, our typical delivery times are under a month, and our typical change times are between minutes to few hours, and very rarely - up to a few days ...

If you haven't looked at QlikView yet, I'd highly recommend - the Personal Edition is free (for life!). I can gladly help anyone who is interested in a "test drive"

The integrated DB2 database on your AS/400 is a fully SQL compliant database which means there are many tools from many vendors, including the one I work for, that can read that data and help you present it various ways for reporting and analytics. If you decide to create a data mart or data warehouse so you can restructure, cleanse, and simplify the data to better support your users and improve performance, you can still use DB2 on the AS/400 and have the benefit of one vendor and one toolset giving people access to both the real-time OLTP data and the data mart/warehouse data. This can help you lower costs and reduce training since your company probably needs both real-time and historical reporting/analysis. The AS/400 is incredibly scalable so you really should not have any concerns about storage.

> The way you described your requirements - "easy to use", "fast", "single environment",
> "time-to-market period is 1 month", - all those requirements are very typical descriptions
> of what QlikView has to offer:

It's good that QlikView doesn't require cubes, but if we limit our discussion to dashboards from vendors that don't require cubes, I think you'd get very similar responses from all vendors on those points.

Since Priya's current thread has to do with DBMS capabilities for BI, I think better questions to answer might be:

* Does QlikView run natively on the AS/400?
* How does QlikView perform with DB2/400?
* Given Priya's current configuration, must he run an ETL process to work with QlikView?
* Can it incorporate other files, such as flat files, natively on the AS/400?
* Can it incorporate business logic encapsulated in RPG programs?

The two threads opened by Priya had intertwined here quite a bit... I was responding to a reply from Jan (jstor) - see above... Sorry if it became irrelevant to the initial title of the thread...

I'd be happy, however, to answer your questions too:

I implemented QlikView on top of AS/400 databases many times - once in my past as a Customer, and several times as a Consultant with my clients. As a matter of fact, most of my QlikVIew clients are using AS/400 based ERP systems.

- QlikView runs on Windows and loads data via ODBC or OLE/DB from any compliant database - AS/400, Unix-based, mainframe, etc... In my experience, BI tools that run natively on the AS/400 are either extremely expensive (e.g. ShowCase...) or somewhat limited in their ability. Windows-based tools appear to be more suited for BI in general, than any other platform-specific tools.

- QlikView performs extremely well with DB2/400. Some of my consultants had never seen an AS/400 before, and they are loading data and developing BI applications with the same ease as if it was Microsoft Access...

- QlikView has its own "data load" process, implemented using a script language that has all needed functionality to extract, transform and load any electronic information, coming from various databases, flat files, Excel spreadsheets, Web sites, etc...

- Integrating files from various sources (including, but not limited, to flat files) is one of QlikView's strongest sides. We can load data from AS/400, merge it with data from Salesforce.com, then join in some accounting spreadsheets, and then add some other information from an Oracle-based system - all within the same load script. The end result will appear totally seamless to the end user. They won't even know (nor should they) what source their data is coming from... Can those flat files be stored on the AS/400? - sure, they can be, if needed.

- The last answer has to be "no", unfortunately... We can't incorporate RPG logic in QlikView. What we do sometimes, if a lot of business logic is already developed in RPG, - we store the end results in a DB2/400 table, and read the results into QlikView. This way, existing business logic can be reused via using the end results of the calculations.

Please don't hesitate to ask more questions - QlikView and AS/400 are two of my favorite technology platforms, I'm happy to discuss both!

Good luck getting away from the megavendors. You're right about the way IT and vendors work, and the slow rate of development. The problem is more than the BI tool, it's the whole layered model of BI and the data warehouse.

The kinds of things you're talking about are usually dependent on different tools than core reporting and analysis, often multiple technologies with a heavy IT component to them. I only looked at the basic BI features across the products so I can't say where Pentaho or any other vendor will meet your exact needs.

Use cubes to implicit project install, maintenance, dependence by code in
others words oriented to cost as investment

QlikView (QV) version client with philosophy excel (no code, only
configuration, template + data) but unlimit in amount rows, intuitive,
colum relational, automatic load data, drill down (for audit), oriented to
use immediate with only click ... and more to guarantee your ROI

QV is horizont because full use drivers for any database (ETL), no vertical
(owner) with no one
For AS400 use drivers ODBC, then using in a complex context with commands
dspfd and dspdbr to identify tables (columns) then you are ready to show
data